The Ecstasy of Dissolution: Psychodynamic Perspectives on Feminist Art, Abjection, and the Transformative Body

This article explores the erotics of fragmentation, monstrosity, and the radical reclamation of self-agency in trans-inclusive feminist visual cultures. Focusing on themes of dismemberment, cannibalism, and bodily deconstruction, it examines how artists depict a reclamation of agency, an interrogation of power, and the transformation of the abject body into a site of resistance and metamorphosis. Drawing upon Kristeva, we analyze the seemingly contradictory aesthetics of horror and ecstasy, highlighting the potential for empowerment through radical submission. Lacan’s concept of jouissance—an experience both blissfully transcendent and painfully excessive—provides a foundational framework for navigating this terrain. The paradox of annihilation as a route to wholeness recurs throughout our analysis. This psychological fantasy reflects a longing to absorb and be absorbed, to dissolve the self-other divide in a connection so total that selfhood itself may not survive. Through case studies of artists including Alina Szapocznikow, Rebecca Horn, Christina Ramberg, and Katarzyna Kozyra, and in dialogue with sacred narratives such as Inanna’s descent, we show how fantasies of being consumed operate as cultural critique and psychological metamorphosis. For women and transgender people, artistic self-fragmentation becomes a defiant reclamation of agency—where surrender, not resistance, offers a path to liberation.